The country of Israel’s first stamps are today’s the #stampoftheday. Israel declared its independence on Friday, May 14, 1948. However, Israel Post, the Israeli postal operator, waited until Sunday May 16 – the day after Shabbat – to issue the country’s first stamps.

Designed by Otto Wallish, a Czech graphic artist who came to Palestine in the 1930s, the stamps’ designs depicted ancient coins found by archeologists researching the First Jewish-Roman War and the Bar Kochba Revolt. Since the name of the state had not yet been determined during the design and secretive printing of the stamps, the stamps said Doar Ivri (“Hebrew mail”) rather than Israel, the name found on all subsequent postage issues. His preliminary designs used “Yehudah” (Hebrew: יהודה‎, cf. Judah or Judea), which also was being considered as the new country’s name. Wallish also proposed to put “Eretz Yisrael” on the stamps, an idea turned down by the provisional government leaders turned down. After speaking privately with German stamp dealers, who recommended a Hebrew equivalent to Deutsche Post (“German mail”), Wallish proposed the phrase Doar Ivri, which was accepted.

My father, like many American Jews, avidly collected Israeli stamps. (My sister has most of those albums.). Although he no longer maintained carefully curated albums after about 1960, he apparently began collecting again sometime and appears to have regularly bought some older collectable stamps, such as Israel’s first stamps and American stamps from the late 1800s and early 1900s from William Fox, a noted stamp dealer based in Springfield, a town next to Summit where he lived for many years (and where I lived from first grade until I left for college).

Wallish, by the way, also was responsible for the calligraphy and design of the scroll for Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Due to drafting debates beyond his control, he had only finished the bottom part of the scroll by the time of the signing and announcement. Consequently, David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, did not read the actual scroll but had to work from handwritten notes for the public declaration on May 14, 1948.

The finished scroll was prepared in three sections that were bound together. Wallish based the calligraphy style on a Torah scroll from the sixteenth century. In addition, Walisch handled the preparation of the exhibit hall in which the State’s Independence was announced. At the direction of Ben-Gurion and the immediate guidance of Ze’ev Sharef, Secretary of the National Administration, Wallish had the hall cleared of art not related to Jews and Israel. He had the hall’s works exchanged for such works as Marc Chagall’s “Jew Holding a Scroll.”

Stay safe and be well!